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| Best Equity house: Morgan Stanley |
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| Also shortlisted: Goldman Sachs and Citi |
As central banks eased credit and liquidity concerns from mid-2012 and the equity capital markets revived, the large universal banks with hefty balance sheets to underwrite primary-market risk slipped a little in the ECM rankings. In less-stressed market conditions, leadership reverted to the traditional ECM franchise firms with strong equity distribution and smart ideas. And although Goldman led the league table for the period under review, Morgan Stanley pips it for the award this year in recognition of a string of important deals for its corporate clients spanning developed and emerging markets, sometimes executed in tough market conditions when other firms hunkered down.
"It was a year when many large corporations used the equity capital markets for strategic transactions, seeing it as preferable to the M&A market partly for tax reasons, but mainly for certainty of outcome. These are deals that simply cannot be allowed to go wrong," says Raj Dhanda, Morgan Stanley’s co-head of global capital markets. Some examples are the £906 million ($1.39